10 ms·
A lot of value of stolen credit cards comes from the reluctance of businesses and law enforcement to go after the users of such stolen cards, as the transaction
by ghoul2 13y ago
A lot of value of stolen credit cards comes from the reluctance of businesses and law enforcement to go after the users of such stolen cards, as the transactions are "small" - sub-1000$.
Last year, I had four fraudulent transactions appear on my card. I am a very cautious user - Linux on the desktop, seperate user and browser profile for e-shopping etc. This was the first time it happened in over 15 years of extensive online card-use.
Two of the transactions were with Netflix to register new streaming accounts. I called up Netflix, and within a couple minutes had a block placed on my card and both the accounts deleted with refunds to my card.
The other two transactions were on frys.com. One was for a laptop and the other, much higher value, for a smartphone. Shockingly enough, while one transaction got security flagged and did not go thru, the laptop one cleared and the laptop had been shipped out before I contacted frys. Frys rep told me on the phone that the information submitted was very clearly and obviously phony - the email address was a string of random letters @gmail.com, name etc everything was fake. Even with the credit card info, the only piece of correct info was the credit card number. No CVV was submitted, no correct billing address, not even the name on the card was correct. Heck, as my credit card is NOT US based, even the country of the card was not correct. Yet Frys shipped it.
I tried to get more information about the fraud but frys refused: they told me point blank, that they will not give me information, they will not initiate a police case, and they will not refund my money even though they were clearly at fault for having the transaction to go thru.
I, not being based in the US, had few options. I filed an online police report with San Jose police, where Frys is based. I also filed an online report with the FBI online fraud division. Both of them assumed I was filing these reports for insurance/reporting purposes, but told me outright that no investigation would take place.
Later, when my bank provided me with more info about the fraud I found out that frys actually challenged my chargeback and provided the transactions details to my bank. As expected they had no case, but I found out from the details that the laptop had been shipped to an address in Abilene, TX. I immediately registered an online report with the Abilene PD as well.
None of the authorities were interested in following up. Considering how trivial it would have been to atleast checkup on the address, this seems like a bad lapse.
I believe it creates a moral hazard: In the end, frys was the one that was out a few hundred dollars, and they refuse to prosecute. Police does not act on my complaint. Once it becomes known that a company has such lax policies, its open season.
- larrys 13y ago"Last year, I had four fraudulent transactions appear on my card. I am a very cautious user - Linux on the desktop, seperate user and browser profile for e-shopping etc. This was the first time it happened in over 15 years of extensive online card-use." As a merchant who frequently gets bogus credit card order over the net I will confirm that nobody seems to particularly care about being notified that we feel it's highly probably that a credit card has been stolen. In other words there isn't a system in place even where a merchant who notices they have a stolen card being used can say "hey you should freeze this card or at least look into it".
- apaprocki 13y agoIt probably differs from issuer to issuer. In my experience Amex is very on top of it and they have always flagged every transaction I have not made myself, immediately sending push notification and SMS where I can ack/nak an automated transaction prompt. If I nak it they freeze the card and overnight a new one. I suppose they don't really care about handling it manually because that would be prohibitively expensive and they prefer to act on the patterns in an automated way. Would be interesting to see aggregate stats by card issuer of how good they are at detecting it.
- matwood 13y agoAmex really is awesome about this. I was traveling not long ago and called them so they could put a travel flag on. I got to an automated response that their systems were smart enough to know if I was traveling and I no longer needed to call prior. IME, Amex is much better at flagging than the Mastercard I have.
- djchen 13y agoThis is only the tip of the iceberg. I would say the bigger issue and thr lower hanging fruit is that we don't use Chip+Pin or Chip+Signature here in the US. Using either tech will go much further than just having police departments investigate after the fact.
- 13y ago